Archive for 'Linux Package Management'

When you run ‘yum update’ on your Fedora system, the default yum configuration will keep the last 3 kernels. This allows you to fail back to a previous working kernel if you encounter an error or a bug. The number of kernels to keep is controlled by the installonly_limit option, which is thoroughly described in […]

Most of the Linux distributions that utilize the yum package manager cache headers and packages by default. These files are cached in the directory identified by the cachedir option, which defaults to /var/cache/yum on all of the hosts I checked. On my Fedora 16 desktop this directory has grown to 167MB in size: $ du […]

I’ve talked in the past about Yum repositories, and how you can create them. If you are using kickstart and want to import the contents of a CD for use by the installer, there are numerous ways you can tackle this issue. One of the easiest methods is to loopback mount the CDs or DVDs […]

If you use an RPM-based Linux distribution, you may have run into one or more cases were your system contains orphaned packages. An orphaned package is a package that doesn’t have any packages that depend on it, and in a number of cases the package is no longer required for the system to function correctly. […]

RPM packages contain the ability to run scripts after a package is added or removed. These scripts can perform actions like adding or removing users, cleaning up temporary files, or checking to make sure a software component that is contained within a package isn’t running. To view the contents of the scripts that will be […]

I have been experimenting with squid at home, and recently configured yum to use the squid proxy server I set up. There are two ways you can get yum to use an HTTP or FTP proxy. First, you can make yum use a proxy for a single session by setting the http_proxy and ftp_proxy environment […]